If you’re searching for a movie with deep characters or a thought out story: please, for the love of God, do not watch Dead Leaves and stay away from it as far as you can. Dead Leaves offers nothing of substance as characters or a deep plot. In fact, it’s the total opposite of said substance. It’s crazy, fast, brutal, vulgar, full of action and lacking almost any plot whatsoever (albeit having some twists here and there). If you’d give a (male) teenager some money and let his creative destruction roar, Dead Leaves might be the result.

Gage recently added a comment to my review of Akira (the one anime that made anime famous as anime in the West) and this one made me think. He mainly writes about Kaori who is the girlfriend of Tetsuo i.e. the Guy Who Goes Horribly Nuts. Gage not only correctly points out that Kaori is only on screen in two scenes in Akira but also that in each segment Kaori is in a living hell and no one seems to care. I addressed his second point in a comment of mine in the original post, so I will use this space to address the first point: the role of Kaori in Akira since her two moments seem to be not that important at all.

Before I start please note that you need to have watched Akira at least once to understand what I’m writing about. If you didn’t, you can gladly skip this blog post if you like.

In other words: you can take almost anything except animation and the negative version is Akira. Where Disney is easy to understand, Akira is hard to understand. Where Disney is fluffy, Akira is hard as a brick. Where Disney animates people as if they are bad over-acting actors, Akira is about realistic animation. Where Disney is “for children”, Akira is for adults etc etc pp ad nauseam, I think you get the picture.

I really can understand that Akira, at the time of its release in 1988, blew the mind of western audiences.

Basically this is also the reason you have to watch Akira, even if you don’t like anime or animation. Even with all its flaws Akira is not called a landmark animation, even a classic, for no reason.

The actors, movies and production crews portrayed in this motion picture blog are fictitious. Any similarity to actors or persons or movies or production crews, fictitious or real, is entirely coincidental and unintentional.